Game on

Like a schoolyard in the summer holidays, a stadium bereft of fans is a strangely purposeless place, but there's also a distinct sense of anticipation - when the weekend comes, so does all the passion, intensity and high drama of top-level sporting action, and The Bridge comes alive.

But first to West London, and a Saturday spent watching another sport invented by your hosts, via a little bit of rule breaking. The story goes like this: that in 1823 a pupil at one of London's most exclusive private schools got bored booting a football from one end of a muddy pitch to another.

His solution? To pick the ball up and run with it, no doubt surprising both his teammates and the opposition - not to mention his understandably aggrieved gym teacher.

The story may be apocryphal but the school was Rugby College, and the eponymous sport is now one of the world's most popular, played all the way from Al Ain to Zhengzhou.

And while Dubai boasts a formidably successful seven-a-side tournament, not even that comes close to the spectacle of a fifteen-a-side smackdown between two of the giants of English rugby.

The Guinness Premiership is one of the world's most competitive leagues.

The competition has been played since 1987, and has evolved into the current Premiership system employing relegation to and promotion from the National Division One competition. Clubs competing in the Guinness Premiership qualify for Europe's two club competitions, the Heineken Cup and the European Challenge Cup. The current champions are the London Wasps.

However, the competition now boasts a team with a distinctively Middle Eastern flavour to it. Etihad Airways is the main sponsor of Harlequins Rugby Club, and earlier this year Abu Dhabi signed a sponsorship and naming rights deal with the club. Abu Dhabi Rugby Football Club has been renamed Abu Dhabi Harlequins Rugby Club after becoming an official affiliate of Harlequins.

In the Guinness Premiership, this year the ‘Quins (as they're known to fans) will battle it out along with 11 other teams to bring home the title, and watching them scrap away at close hand certainly isn't for the faint of heart.

Rugby is a quick, skillful and above all brutal game, unforgiving and exhilarating at the same time. On the terraces at the ‘Quins' home ground, The Stoop, you'll feel every tackle, try and testosterone-fuelled charge for the line, alongside thousands of other fans.

The home side boasts some of the brightest talents in world rugby, including England stars Nick Easter, David Strettle and Andy Gomersall, and depending on the visitors you're also in with a shout of seeing legends such as Jonny Wilkinson, Raphael Ibanez and Danny Cipriani strut their stuff.

On Sunday, and it's back to The Bridge to see those formerly empty terraces in action. The Premier League is the world's richest and most popular football league, and while as many as one hundred million armchair supporters tune in from around the world to catch the big games, there's no substitute for being at the ground when those two teams stride out onto the pitch.

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